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On the 45th anniversary of the Naksa, former PLO advisor and Palestine Papers whistleblower Ziyad Clot says a Palestinian state existing alongside Israel will never be achieved

Last month, thousands of Jewish Israelis celebrated Yom Yerushalayim, or Jerusalem Day. It was the 45th anniversary of what many Israelis consider the “reunification” of Jerusalem, an occasion for right-wing revelers to sing nationalistic songs, chant anti-Muslim slogans, and cheer for the mass murdering Jewish extremist Baruch Goldstein while marching triumphantly through the Muslim Quarter of the Old City. Today, Palestinians will observe Naksa Day, marking “the Setback” of 1967. It is the 45th anniversary of Israel’s ongoing military occupation, an ignominious date that inspires angry demonstrations across the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian refugee camps, and in cities around the world.

As the occupation grinds on, propelling rapid Israeli settlement expansion and the consolidation of apartheid rule, the concept of a sovereign Palestinian state seems like just that — a fantastical idea that belies the oppressive reality on the ground. The Palestinian Authority that was created to administer the future state today serves little purpose besides doling out paychecks to a long roll of dependents while providing Israel with a convenient occupation subcontractor that routinely arrestsnon-compliant Palestinians and internal critics of its authoritarian rule. Having been fragmented through generations of dispossession and colonization, then physically separated from one another by the separation wall and the siege of Gaza, Palestinians face an increasingly limited array of options for resisting Israel’s settler-colonial predations. With hopes for a viable, independent state all but dashed, questions about short term tactics and long term goals are being debated with renewed intensity.

While Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza prepared to commemorate Naksa Day, I met in a cafe in Washington DC with an author and former PLO legal advisor named Ziyad Clot. In January 2008, Clot was recruited to advise the Negotiations Support Unit of the PLO, which was tasked with overseeing the Palestinian refugee file. Until he resigned in dismay 11 months later, Clot said he witnessed “a cruel enterprise” that “deepened Israeli segregationist policies” and “excluded for the most part the vast majority of the Palestinian people.” In 2010, with images of Israel’s grisly assault on the Gaza Strip still singed in his memory, Clot published a provocatively titled polemic in his home country of France that has not yet been translated into English: “Il n’y aura pas d’Etat Palestinian,” or, “There will not be a Palestinian state.”

Soon after the book’s release, Clot leaked hundreds of documents relating to the so-called peace process to Al Jazeera, leading to the release of the Palestine Papers. Greeted with fury by PA officials, met with eerie silence by the Israeli government and quickly overshadowed by the Egyptian revolution, the Palestine Papers confirmed the peace process as a cruel farce that pitted an unrelenting occupier against an unrepresentative Palestinian entity beholden to antagonistic outside forces.

In our discussion, Clot went beyond his critique of the peace process, offering prescriptions for moving the Palestinian struggle past the drive for statehood and the failed experiment of the PA. According to Clot, the first priority of the struggle should be to ensure the full representation of the more than 10 million Palestinians living around the world by the PLO, a goal that can be achieved by allowing them to vote in Palestinian National Council elections. Once Palestinian exiles and refugees become convinced that they have a stake in the future of Palestine, Clot claimed their financial and cultural contributions would enable the PA to wean itself off of its onerous Western benefactors. Considering that only 8 percent of the Palestinians driven from the homes by the fighting in 1967 were allowed to return to Palestine, bringing them back into the political fray seems like an appropriate way to redress the crisis of the Naksa.

My interview with Ziyad Clot follows:

MB: Explain the title of your book. What caused you to conclude that there will never be a sovereign Palestinian state?

ZC: The big question today is whether after 45 years of occupation why there has been no sovereign state. The only advice I’d give to someone interested in this is to look at a map and ignore what will be the hypothetical borders of a future Palestinian state and recognize the fact that the two populations are intermingled in Israel and West Bank. Because of the colonization and the fact that no one has been able to stop it since 1967 we now reach a situation where in the West Bank there is not a single hill without a settlement or an outpost. How do you create a viable Palestinian state in that situation, and where this is not enough land or water to create that state? You can’t. Therefore all the attributes of the state aren’t there anymore. Jerusalem has become a de facto unified capital of Israel and what really struck me when I was there was the extraordinary gap between the facts on the ground and what is still being negotiated in this parallel world which has totally lost touch with reality.

MB: The Palestine Papers provide a portrait of a Palestinian Authority that is out of touch to say the least. Not only were they willing to negotiate away most of East Jerusalem, they seemed psychologically disjointed from the entire refugee situation. How can you account for the disconnect?

ZC: They [PA officials] live and negotiate under a situation of occupation. It’s easy for us to say they’re giving up and are ready for any compromise and that all the red lines have been crossed — and this is my personal belief — but they have to cope with so many constraints and obstacles that along the years that they lost touch with the exiles, then the refugees, then Gaza, and now East Jerusalem because of the wall, so they are left in this small enclave that they try to administer without full sovereignty. So along the years they have internalized these constraints and became accustomed to the discourse that is acceptable to the West. Because of the PA’s structure and how it is financed they are more accountable to the international donors than the Palestinian people. So this explains why the bridges between Palestinians don’t exist anymore. If there is one area where Palestinians should focus it’s on the issue of representation. Because the peace process has become irrelevant the question of who represents the Palestinians and how they are represented is most important at this point.

MB: Recently the Israeli politician and peace process fixture Yossi Beilin urged Mahmoud Abbas to shut down the Palestinian Authority. He even used the same language as you, calling the peace process a “farce.” Do you agree that the PA should be disbanded and if so, what comes next?

ZC: Dismantling the PA is a tough call because there are so many interests involved. If you dismantle it tomorrow a large proportion of the West Bank will be left without income. So it’s an extraordinary political decision to make. You also have to consider that the Israeli occupation is more brutal than what the Palestinians are facing with the PA so do we really want to face the occupation directly? If the long term goal is the achievement of Palestinian rights and self-determination, then it’s preferable. In the short term, this will probably mean a lot of suffering. Are the Palestinians prepared for that? I don’t think so. So to put it simply: These critical issues have to be decided by the Palestinians. It’s up to them to decide whether this state is achievable. If not, the different options should be submitted to them. Unfortunately, because of this lack of representation, this is impossible. That’s why I think the first priority should be to restructure the PLO. In the near term, the second priority should be to preserve the humanity of Palestinians who are experiencing massive suffering — especially the people in Gaza — because a political solution might be a long way off.

MB: What specific measures can be employed to offer the whole Palestinian people representation?

ZC: All Palestinians should be allowed to vote in the Palestinian National Council elections — all 10 million Palestinians should be involved and each voice should be heard. This is a very strong asset for the Palestinians. There are strong communities of Palestinians outside the territories. If you want to use them as an asset, either financially, politically, or culturally, you have to give them representation. The problem with the PA is not a lack of financial resources — there are a lot of wealthy Palestinians out there. So then we have to ask why the West is writing the checks without holding the Israelis accountable for anything. Wealthy Palestinians would be more than happy to contribute but unfortunately they don’t recognize themselves as actors who have representation in Palestine. Despite all the internal differences, we have to establish a structure to allow all these voices to be heard.

I recently spoke to Alternet’s Joshua Holland about law and politics in Israel. Our conversation focused on the image of Israel as a Western style democracy coping with legitimate security concerns versus the reality of Israel as an ethnocratic state managing its demographic peril through authoritarian measures approved by the Jewish majority. The discussion can be heard here. Below is a transcript via Alternet:

Joshua Holland: Max, I don’t want to talk about Iran today. I don’t want to talk about the Israeli lobby in the United States, and I don’t want to talk about the Occupation. I want to talk about something I don’t think gets enough attention in this country, which is the sharp rightward turn of the Israeli government.

One of the great non-sequiturs of our political discourse is that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. And I say it’s a great non-sequitur because it’s usually used as a response to, for example, criticism of the Occupation. You say this Occupation is terrible, and people say it’s the only democracy in the Middle East.

Anyway, Tzipi Livni, the leader of the opposition Kadima Party, accused Benjamin Netanyahu recently of, “an attempt to transform Israel into a type of dictatorship.” Kadima lawmakers said that recent legislation passed by the Knesset represented, “the gravest challenge to democracy since the establishment of the state in 1948.” Tell me about the sharp rightward lurch. When did this happen, because I remember when I was a kid Israel was almost a socialist country.

Max Blumenthal: Well, by not wanting to talk about Iran you’re an anti-Semite and I condemn that.

JH: Max, I’m a self-loathing Jew — please get this straight.

MB: Part of Netanyahu’s goal in focusing on Iran is taking the Palestinian question off the table, and so it’s good that you’re talking about this. Israel has never been a democracy in the sense that we think about a democracy. It’s a settler, colonial state that privileges the Jewish majority, which it created through violent methods of demographic manipulation over the indigenous Palestinian outclass.

That’s true even inside Israel. So when you hear people like Tzipi Livni — who is for now the head of the Kadima Party but soon to be ousted, and actually came out of the Likud Party and was aide to Ariel Sharon – when you hear liberal Zionists, people on the Zionist left, warning that Israel is turning into a fascist state what they’re talking is the occupation laws creeping back over the green line, and that these right-wing elements are actually starting to crack down on the democratic rights that have been afforded to the Jewish majority inside Israel. So Jews who are left-wingers, who are dissidents and speak out against state policy are actually beginning to feel a slight scintilla of the kind of oppression that Palestinians have felt since the foundation of the state of Israel. That’s where this criticism is coming from.

I think we really need to get beyond the discourse of occupation and the discourse of fascism, and instead to talk about institutional discrimination and apartheid, which is what has been present since the foundation of the state of Israel.

JH: Now I want to talk about some of the specific measures that have been proposed, some of which have passed. There are some things that have been pulled back or tabled temporarily due to international pressure, and other have actually gotten through and become law. Tell be about the crackdown on NGOs.

The following piece was co-authored by Joseph Dana. A shorter version recently appeared at Alternet.

The men and women who set out to build a Jewish state in historic Palestine made little secret of their settler-colonial designs. Zionism’s intellectual author, Theodor Herzl, described the country he envisioned as “part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism.” “All the means we need, we ourselves must create them, like Robinson Crusoe on his island,” Herzl told an interviewer in 1898. The Labor Zionist movement’s chief ideologue, Berl Katznelson, was more blunt than Herzl, declaring in 1928, “The Zionist enterprise is an enterprise of conquest.” More recently, and perhaps most crudely, former Prime Minister and current Defense Minister Ehud Barak described the goal of Zionism as maintaining “a villa in the jungle.”

Those who dedicated themselves to the formation of the Jewish State may have formulated their national identity through an idealized vision of European enlightenedness, but they also recognized that their lofty aims would not be realized without brute force. As Katznelson said, “It is not by chance that I speak of settlement in military terms.” Thus the Zionist socialists gradually embraced the ideas of radical right-wing ideologue Vladimir Jabotinsky, who outlined a practical strategy in his 1922 essay, “The Iron Wall,” for fulfilling their utopian ambitions. “Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population,” Jabotinsky wrote. “This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population — an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs.” According to Jabotinsky, residents of the Zionist yishuv (community) could not hope to enjoy a European standard of life in the heart of the Arab world without physically separating themselves from the natives. This would require tireless planning, immense sacrifice and no shortage of bloodshed. And all who comprised the Zionist movement, whether left, right, or center, would carry the plan towards fulfillment. As Jabotinsky wrote, “All of us, without exception, are constantly demanding that this power strictly fulfill its obligations. In this sense, there are no meaningful differences between our ‘militarists’ and our ‘vegetarians.’”

One of the greatest misperceptions of Israeli politics is that the right-wing politicians who claim Jabotinsky’s writings as their lodestar perpetuate the most egregious violence against the Palestinians. While brimming with anti-Arab resentment, the Israeli right’s real legacy consists mostly of producing durable strategies and demagogic rhetoric. The Labor Zionists who dominated Israel’s political scene for decades bear the real responsibility for turning the right’s ideas into actionable policies. The dynamic is best illuminated by the way in which successive Labor Party governments implemented the precepts outlined in Jabotinsky’s “Iron Wall” under the cover of negotiations with the Palestinians. As early as 1988, the Laborites Yitzhak Rabin and Haim Ramon were advocating for the construction of a concrete wall to separate the Palestinians from “Israel proper.” When Rabin declared his intention to negotiate a two-state solution with the PLO, his supporters adopted a slogan that had previously belonged to the right-wing Moledet Party: “Them over there; us over here.” Then, when Rabin placed his signature on the Oslo Accords in 1993, Israel began surrounding the Gaza Strip with electrified fencing while revoking Palestinian work permits by the thousands.

When I met Bassem Tamimi at his home in the occupied West Bank village of Nabi Saleh this January, his eyes were bloodshot and sunken, signs of the innumerable sleepless nights he had spent waiting for Israeli soldiers to take him to prison. As soon as two children were seized from the village in the middle of the night and subjected to harsh interrogations that yielded an unbelievable array of “confessions,” the 44-year-old Tamimi’s arrest became inevitable. On 25 March, the army finally came, dragging him away to Ofer military prison, a Guantanamo-like West Bank facility where he had previously been held for a 12-month term for the vaguely defined crime of “incitement.” His trial before a military court that convicts more than 99 percent of Palestinians brought before it is scheduled to begin on 8 May.

Like nearly all of his neighbors, Tamimi has spent extended time in Israeli detention facilities and endured brutal treatment there. In 1993, he was arrested on suspicion of having murdered an Israeli settler in Beit El. Tamimi was severely tortured for weeks by the Israeli Shin Bet in order to extract a confession from him. Tamimi said that during the torture he was dropped from a high ceiling onto a concrete floor and woke up a week later in an Israeli hospital. In the end, he was cleared of all charges.

With his wife, Nariman, and his brother, Naji, Tamimi has been at the center of Nabi Saleh’s popular resistance against the occupation since its inception in 2009. The village’s unarmed struggle has brought hundreds of Israelis and international activists to participate each Friday in boisterous and theatrical demonstrations that invariably encounter harsh Israeli violence, including the use of live ammunition against children. While other villages involved in the popular struggle have seen their ranks winnowed out by a harsh regime of repression and imprisonment, Nabi Saleh’s protests continue unabated, irking the army and frustrating the settlers of Halamish, who intend to expand their illegal colony further onto Nabi Saleh’s land.

Tamimi and I spoke amid the din of a stream of visitors parading in and out of his living room, from international activists living in the village to local children to a group of adolescent boys from the nearby town of Qurawa, who told me they came to spend time with Tamimi and his family “because this is what the Palestinian struggle is about.” Tamimi is a high school teacher in Ramallah and his professorial nature is immediately apparent. As soon as I arrived at his front door for what I thought would be a casual visit, he sat me down for an hour-long lesson on the history, attitudes and strategy that inform the brand of popular struggle he and his neighbors had devised during weekly meetings at the village cultural center.

Our discussion stretched from the origins of Nabi Saleh’s resistance in 1967 to the Oslo Accords, when the village was sectioned into two administrative areas (Areas B and C), leaving all residents of the Israeli-controlled portion (Area C) vulnerable to home demolition and arbitrary arrests. Tamimi insisted to me that Nabi Saleh’s residents are not only campaigning to halt the expropriation of their land, they seek to spread the unarmed revolt across all of occupied Palestine. “The reason the army wants to break our model [of resistance] is because we are offering the basis for the third intifada,” Tamimi said.

Juliano Mer Khamis with the cast of Alice in Wonderland, his final production at Jenin Freedom Theater

Update:Some have accused me on Twitter and elsewhere of being “irresponsible” for posting this. I assume they can’t read headlines, because I printed it as Aki Orr’s personal opinion — not mine. And if anyone is entitled to his opinion, it is Aki. He has seen and done more than all of them combined.

Adam at Mondoweiss reminded me about Udi Aloni’s excellent review of Juliano’s production of “Alice.” Read it here.

After the killing of Juliano Mer Khamis, I asked my friend Akiva Orr (watch my interview with him here) to write something about the actor. As an activist and writer since the early 1950’s, Akiva got to know Juliano and his mother, Arna. Akiva attended Juliano’s funeral yesterday in Kibbutz Ramot Menashe, then wrote me the following:

Sad news

Yesterday the Israeli-Arab actor-director Juliano Mer-Khamis was shot dead by a hooded assassin near his Freedom Theatre in Jenin.

Juliano Mer-Khamis’s funeral took place today in Kibbutz Ramot Menashe some 10 feet from his mother’s grave (which he designed).

I knew his mother very well.

Arna (1930-1995) was a genuine humanist who could not remain quiet when she saw someone being wronged

It outraged her and she reacted vehemently.

It was a guts response, not a rational response.

Jules took after her but had the added complication that his Dad was a christian Arab (once the leader of the CP in Nazareth) whereas Arna was a secular Jew whose father founded the medical corps in the IDF was a world authority on Malaria, hated Ben-Gurion, and expelled her after marrying an Arab.

Jules had a cultural ID complex which he exploited through art. He was an excellent actor. He acted out his life.

About 800 people attended the funeral, two third Arabs one third Jews.

I met many old friends there.

Nowadays we are too old to meet in demos so we meet in funerals.

An Arab youth choir sang and many people said a few words.

Udi Adiv (who did 12 years in prison for trying [unsuccessfully] to set up a Jewish-Arab Israeli armed struggle group against Israel in 1971) told me he was in constant contact with Jules.

Jules complained about the the arch conservative leadership of the Jenin refugee camp and planned to move to Jenin town, which is more enlightened.

The older generation leadership (50% of the camp inmates are under 20) was worried that the youth followed Juliano and his “Freedom Theater”.

He preached freedom not only from Israel, but also from Muslim tradition.

Many young girls, who rebel against the subservient role of women in the Palestinian society, were ardent actresses.

The oldies didn’t like the fact that girls appear on stage, have roles, and act together with boys.

The theatre is located inside the camp.

There were two attempts to burn it down.

The latest play Jules staged was “Alice in wonderland”

Most theatres in the West Bank refused to show it because the major role of a clever girl outraged all oldies in the West Bank.

No newspaper in the West Bank mentioned the Alice play.

It seems this was too much for the oldies.

So Jules paid with his life for staging “Alice in wonderland” in Palestine.

He died for the cause of “women’s liberation” … which goes much beyond “Palestine liberation.”